Since she graduated from high school in 2004, Ashley Hill has been attending college on and off, but she’s still at least a semester shy of earning her degree.

“Life kind of just happens,” as she put it.

That’s perhaps an understatement in Hill’s case. A New Orleans native, Hill began attending college in her hometown after graduating high school all while caring for her young daughter. But in 2005, the city was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and Hill and her family had to relocate to Texas, beginning several years of fits and starts in higher education.

The need to work to afford school and child care for her daughter made it difficult for Hill to devote herself to college full time. And even when she found herself able to attend, she sometimes struggled to afford the cost — occasionally leaving mid-semester due to a lack of funds.

Now 32, Hill is happy with how her life is going. She does work she’s proud of as a birth and reproductive justice advocate, her daughter is 15 and doing well and Hill is getting married soon.

‘I really wish I did have a degree because what if the momentum of everything stopped?’
—Ashley Hill, a parent who as been in and out of college

Still, “it’s always lingering for me,” she said. “I really wish I did have a degree because what if the momentum of everything stopped?” But given the cost and the $75,000 in student debt Hill said she’s already accrued, finishing college — she believes she’s about 21 credits short of a degree — isn’t feasible.

“Everybody would come up to me and say ‘you’re too smart to have not finished school’,” Hill said. “But there’s no support systems.”

Student parents make up about one in five undergraduate students

Hill is just one of millions of parents who are currently studying in college classrooms or flowing in and out of school. Roughly 22% of all undergraduate students — or about 3.8 million people — are raising children, according to an analysis published this week by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank and Ascend at the Aspen Institute.

Between the 2011-2012 academic year and the 2015-2016 academic year, the number of parents in school dropped 20%. Though the number of undergraduate students declined overall, that doesn’t totally explain the drop in student parents. For one, student parents’ numbers dropped more precipitously and in addition, they account for a smaller share of the undergraduate population than in the past.

In addition, women are having children later and the rate of teenage pregnancy has decreased, which could be contributing to the drop in student parents, said Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, study director at IWPR and one of the authors of the study.

Perhaps one of the biggest factors driving the decline is an uptick in the economy, she said. With more jobs available, working can be “a faster way to put money in your pocket and put food on the table,” she said.

But given that in today’s economy workers without a college degree are at far greater risk of facing economic insecurity, colleges, universities and policymakers “need to be thinking strategically about how to make that decision worth it,” for parents, Reichlin Cruse said.

“Our higher education system needs to be taking steps to ensure that the choice to go to college is one that’s accessible to parents and low-income families,” she said.

That includes offering more flexibility so that student-parents can more easily fit their coursework in between their jobs and child care. For-profit colleges have successfully lured millions of student parents by making it easier for them to enroll and fit classes into their schedules — during the 2015-2016 academic year, roughly 45% of the students enrolled at for-profit colleges were parents, IWPR found.

But in many cases, students who attend these schools struggle to find work after they graduate that will pay enough for them to repay the high debt loads they incur. Four major for-profit college chains have collapsed in the past four years under the weight of allegations they lured students with misleading graduation and job placement data. Those events have displaced so many students that they may be responsible in part for the drop off of student parents in college, the report found.

That dynamic “speaks to how the higher education system needs to be creating opportunities for [student parents] to go to quality nonprofits,” she said.

That could happen by making it easier for student parents to afford and access child care, Reichlin Cruse said. Over the past several years, the number of child care centers on college campuses has declined, even as the number of student-parents has gone up. Making college more affordable broadly would also help student parents; on average they borrow $13,504 to earn their degrees, IWPR found, though the situation is more dire for black student parents, who take on an average of $18,113 in debt.

According to Hill, simple fixes like providing student-parents with priority registration so they can make sure they’re able to fit their courses into their busy schedules would go along way.

“Acknowledge that student parents exist,” she said.

Jillian
Berman

Jillian Berman covers student debt and millennial finance. You can follow her on Twitter @JillianBerman.

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